Mike Johnson Faces Brutal June
“House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is staring down a brutal stretch of deadlines and uncomfortable votes when the House returns from recess next week,” Axios reports.
“Johnson bought himself time this spring by punting a series of politically difficult fights. But those deadlines are now coming due, setting up a brutal June for House Republicans.”
MAGA Lives In a Different World Than the Rest of Us
Paul Krugman: “YouGov’s surveys subdivide Republicans into those who do and those who don’t support MAGA — and the economic views of these two groups are very different. A remarkable 65 percent of non-MAGA Republicans say that the economy is getting worse, while only 11 percent say that it is getting better…”
“Aside from MAGA Republicans, Americans are bunched at the upper left, with few people seeing the economy getting better and the vast majority seeing it as getting worse. Non-MAGA Republicans are much more similar in their views to independents, and even to Democrats, than they are to MAGA.”
“So how big is the group that believes that we have a good economy? Only 19 percent of Americans.”
The Results of Trump’s Latest Physical Exam
“The White House released a three-page report from President Trump’s physician late Friday detailing the results of his physical exam at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center earlier this week,” the New York Times reports.
“Friday’s report, written by the president’s physician, Dr. Sean P. Barbabella, gave a similarly upbeat assessment of Mr. Trump’s health, declaring that the 79-year-old president ‘remains in excellent health, demonstrating strong cardiac, pulmonary, neurological, and overall physical function.’”
Washington Post: “Barbabella’s report once again suggested that Trump’s frequent handshaking and use of aspirin were behind the bruising, though some outside physicians have suggested that is unlikely, noting that the bruises have appeared on Trump’s nondominant left hand.”
Wall Street Journal: “The president weighed 238 pounds, 14 pounds more since his 2025 exam.”
Is JD Vance the 2028 Front Runner?
New York Times: “It is not that Mr. Trump is abandoning Mr. Vance. He involves him in major decisions, has given him high-profile opportunities to position himself for 2028 and trusts the 41-year-old vice president to wage partisan warfare on his behalf. In a cabinet meeting this week, Mr. Trump compared Mr. Vance to Eliot Ness, the mob-busting federal agent, for working to ferret out fraud in mostly Democratic controlled states.”
“Mr. Trump has long conducted running focus groups on his closest aides, and appears to enjoy needling them and keeping them off balance as a way of asserting his dominance. Several people in the president’s inner circle have been subject to his quasi-public questioning of their performance and their future.”
Powerful AI Super PACs Are Dueling Over the Midterms
New York Times: “The bad blood between the super PACs comes as powerful Silicon Valley companies race to shape the future of A.I. regulation. The groups are two of the biggest spenders in this year’s midterm elections, laying out nearly $24 million and promising that over $100 million more is on the way.”
Trump Squeezes Immigrants By Cutting Them Off
New York Times: “For more than a year, administration officials have sought to pull every bureaucratic lever possible to cut off immigrants — both documented and undocumented — from jobs, medical care, financial services, tax credits and even from enrolling their children in day care. The goal has been to compel immigrants to leave the country, and, in the long run, to eliminate incentives that draw many people to the United States in the first place.”
“The initiative underscores the president’s ability to reshape immigration policy through executive orders and the vast power of federal regulations while sidestepping Congress. And it shows how the administration has pursued more creative — and lower-profile — tactics after Mr. Trump’s militarized deportation raids into major cities prompted political backlash earlier this year.”
Trump Is Intent on Writing His Own History
“President Trump’s presidential library, planned as a gilded glass tower on a donated chunk of Miami waterfront, is designed to be what Eric Trump, the president’s middle son, calls ‘a lasting testament to an amazing man.’ If the president has his way, it will also serve as a monument to his norm-busting conduct in office,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Trump had said that the $1 billion project, the priciest presidential library yet, could include a hotel and retail sales outlets. But more disturbing to historians and government watchdogs is his determination to own and control every document a presidential library would contain. Not since the Watergate era, when President Richard M. Nixon took his fight to control the incriminating White House tapes to the Supreme Court, has a president worked so hard to shield documentary evidence of his administration’s inner workings from public view.”
Trump Reacts with Fury at Ruling on Kennedy Center
President Trump railed against a judge’s ruling that his name be removed from the Kennedy Center in an incensed social media post, suggesting that he was considering casting the performing arts center aside as one of his personal projects, the New York Times reports.
Trump wrote that unless he was free to decide the center’s trajectory, he had “no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey.”
Trump’s Slush Fund Sparks Alarm Inside White House
“President Trump’s top aides have discussed whether he should kill the administration’s nearly $1.8 billion ‘anti-weaponization’ fund in exchange for getting immigration enforcement funding passed next month,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“More than a dozen Republican senators have privately urged top Trump aides to drop the fund since its creation last week, said people familiar with the outreach, including Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who is usually supportive of the president’s efforts.”
“Administration officials have grown increasingly concerned about the viability of the fund, people familiar with the matter said, which had been expected to provide payouts to an array of Trump allies.”
Judge Reopens Trump’s Suit Against IRS
A federal judge in Miami made a striking turnabout on Friday, reopening President Trump’s $10 billion case against the I.R.S. and saying that she wanted to investigate “grievous allegations” that the hasty deal to resolve it was “premised on deception,” the New York Times reports.
The ruling by the judge, Kathleen Williams, was a significant blow both to Mr. Trump, who had voluntarily dismissed the suit last week, and to the Justice Department.
U.S. Has Not Confirmed Mines in Strait of Hormuz
“The U.S. military has not confirmed that Iran placed mines in the Strait of Hormuz despite continued searches of the critical waterway, adding to growing confusion around the war,” NBC News reports.
“The military searches using underwater drones, water robots and manned and unmanned aircraft have found some objects that could be mines, but none have been definitively identified.”
Platner Says Collins Is ‘Trying to Offload Her Mistakes’
Maine U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner (D) isn’t backing down from his comments that Sen. Susan Collins (R) “sent me” to fight in Iraq, charging her with “trying to offload her mistakes” for pointing out that he chose to enlist, Semafor reports.
A Very Busy Week
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Trump Clears Way for Companies to Avoid Taxes in Havens
New York Times: “A year ago, the Trump administration withdrew from a global effort to curb offshore tax-dodging by multinational companies. That decision has been a huge gift to corporate America, enabling companies to avoid at least $40 billion in income taxes since the beginning of 2025.”
“A New York Times review of securities filings from nearly 500 companies showed that they avoided taxes by attributing hundreds of billions of dollars in earnings to low- or no-tax foreign locales like Cyprus, Bermuda, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. Often, corporations funneled the profits through subsidiaries in places where they had no employees, offices or customers.”
Journalist Favored by Trump in Talks to Join White House
New York Times: “John Solomon, a reporter who gained President Trump’s favor through his work questioning the federal investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russians who meddled in the 2016 election, is in discussions to join the White House as special government employee.”
Why Can’t Musk Do for Politics What He Did for Industry?
The Economist: “Politics is NOT exactly rocket science. How interesting, then, that Elon Musk is so bad at it. Unlike the two or three industries—and still counting—where Mr Musk has done as much or more than any other human this century to advance the species, politics does not require much technical sophistication or even rigor.”
“The maths tend to be simple addition or division. Yet the calculations matter: the flourishing of the civilization whose multiplanetary future preoccupies Mr Musk requires a healthy politics, much as his own companies, such as Tesla and SpaceX, counted on far-sighted government subsidies and contracts, not to mention the principled rule of law, to succeed.”
“But unlike the other fields Mr Musk has shaped, his contribution to this bulwark of civilization is to make it not more imaginative and optimistic but more atavistic and fearful, and just plain dumber.”
“In politics, in contrast to other industries, Mr Musk has not chosen the path of revolutionary entrepreneurship.”
